Grab and Keel

Many in the fire science community are disappointed by the recent reporting in High Country News (HCN) on the tragic fires in northern California (Shrub-choked wildlands played a role in California fires, HCN 10/24/2017).

Portraying the ecology of the region as “choked” by native shrublands not only demonizes California’s richly biodiverse, characteristic habitat, the chaparral, but fails to come close to explaining why and how the fires occurred. Little effort was made in the article to help readers understand the situation. Instead, the article simply repeated hackneyed phrases over-used to describe fires in the western US.

Every fire is different. Large, high-intensity wildfires have long been a natural feature of these chaparral landscapes. What has changed is that we have put people in harm’s way.

A quick overview on Google Earth of what burned in the devastating Tubbs Fire would have revealed that it was not “shrub-choked wildlands,”…

The Burlington College closure has a chance of causing trouble for the Bernie Sanders campaign, since his wife Jane played a key role in sinking the college under a mountain of debt. There are whispers of a federal probe, and now Seven Days’ Terri Hallenbeck reports that VTGOP Vice Chair Brady Toensing claims to have “new information” linking Senator Sanders to the case.

“I was recently approached and informed that Senator Bernie Sanders’ office improperly pressured People’s United Bank to approve the loan application,” Toensing said in letters to U.S. Attorney Eric Miller and to Fred Gibson Jr., the acting inspector general of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

There is cause for skepticism aplenty; Toensing is a Republican official, and he refuses to say anything more about his sources or his new information.

But there’s one more thing you should know, and Hallenbeck didn’t catch it.

For the first few minutes in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, it seemed that Hillary might be embarking on an apology tour wherein every public speaking event for the next X number of months would have to consist of Hillary enumerating reasons why she is not president.  After the initial, compulsory mea culpas, however, the interview, moderated by Kara Swisher and Walter Mossberg, got into the real meat of how technology writ large including data collection and analysis, social media, and hacking affected both the running of the campaign and how people received and viewed information.

Hillary, as always, was informed and informative. She knows a lot about where the holes were, and it was fascinating to hear her explain what went wrong, what went right, and how to move forward.

A moment that was particularly gratifying was her response to a question about her Goldman Sachs speeches which, infamously, were…

Key aspects of sustainable food production

‘Putting sustainable food production into context’ by Jerry Coleby-Williams, Patron, National Toxics Network Inc. 

At the Meetings of the conferences of the parties to the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions, Geneva, Switzerland, 24th April to 6th May 2017.

“There is no economy without food.

I am here to tell you that industrial chemicals – pesticides and fertilisers – are unnecessary for food production.

The food growers I mix with are interested in reducing the cost of operating a farm. They are not interested in spending money unnecessarily on industrial chemicals or fossil fuels.

The growers I work with are the opposite of industrial monocultures, they create productive, resilient landscape mosaics.

Such growers are interested in increasing productivity and profitability of their business by reducing the operating costs of food production.

No farming system is more productive than a mixed, one hectare family run…